8 Man After

8 Man is not just another anime with a totally stupid title, but also one of those many anime productions that, for some incomprehensible reason, has been hailed as a cult classic by many fans of Japanese factory cartoons. It is only the slightly better drawings (compared to the large mass of the bad anime film genre) that do not push the film down to 0 stars. Or 1 Star, because you can't give no star at imdb.

i found this movie to be one of the many animes about cyborgs, this one has a twist, the cyborg is having trouble controlling his aggression when taking on bad guys. The thought that he is becoming as violent as the enemy he must stop is causing him to doubt his affectiveness as a hero. the only thing that makes him continue are the few memories of how he died and how he must stop the killer at all cost

This film is an excellent action film where you can turn your brain off and just watch as a human turned cyborg goes after a crimelord called the puppetmaster, who uses cyborgs of his own to control the city. Probably the most dimensional character is the washed up football player who has cyborg implants put in that just cause him and his son more trouble.

Some of the English dubbed dialogue was a bit messed up, as it is in many foreign films, but other than that the voices were coherent and the story was as good as an action film could get.

I'm sure I'd give it a much higher rating if the english dubbing wasn't so terrible. I want to hear the original language of any foreign movie with subtitles. I'm an extremely fast reader so subtitles don't bother me, in fact I welcome them. If you absolutely have to dub at least get people who can act. I know this will offend people but I don't care.

The Perfect Collection brings to one "film" all the episodes of this story, and I was glad to find this VHS when I did. I grew up with the original "8th" Man TV series in black and white, during the same TV era as Astro Boy, Ultra Man and continued with Speed Racer. Even though those productions were somewhat raw, the underlying themes and cultural sensibilities spoke to me at the gut level.

This is not a "modernized" version of the original. It stands alone as the retelling of the story by new writers and artists, making their choices and giving it their style.

No character is flat. None of them is without some sort of flaw or inconsistency. This is story and character development at its finest, even with the production flaws when compared to more modern efforts. On my copy of the video tape, the major flaw was in the audio tracks, but it's still watchable and enjoyable. The poor audio is the only reason I took my rating down a peg from a 9 out of 10.

I do have one complaint: the character of 8 man seriously pre-dates Robocop, and while it is speculative to say that Robocop was directly based on 8 man, it is totally wrong to say that 8 man was based on Robocop. Please, do your research before making such claims.